Journalist, writer

Month: February 2017

That Google tool to search how often words were used in books in the last two centuries, I forgot about it. Then I remembered it and looked for words. Here is what I learned.

Both Hyperbole and Exaggeration experienced a dip during the first and second World War.

I suppose that’s how you might know something is actually bad. Although, Exaggeration is now in serious decline since 1980. Maybe in favor of the use of Hyperbole which we use doubly since then, perhaps due to the upsurge of Education in the 1970s.

With hyperbolic knowledge however, we also became Scared.

And not just scared we became Scared of the, Scared of him, Scared of her, Scared of what? Scared of being, scared of them, scared of a, scared of it.

But all humans are children and we truly are mostly just Scared of the dark.

Before 1880 we were not yet Scared of being anything.

I suppose before then we knew exactly what we were. While we only became ‘Scared of being’ when Octopus increased. While its decline after 1960 has gone unnoticed.

It could be the Seahorse.

Nevertheless, while the amount of people on earth nearly doubled after 1980 and just after the cellular phone was invented we became unbelievably scared of being alone.

We became scared of being alone in and because five is the maximum amount of words you can search books for I’m going to assume the answer is really ‘afraid of being alone in the dark.’

After the 1940s our Compassion rose but we never became as empathetic as we were back in 1800.

Even though we write Stab about just as much.

We became less Extreme after 1960.

Possibly because in the 20th century extreme became a group effort you could join in on. A path to follow.

Another lesson: when you write too much about democracy it goes badly.

And Failure defeated Progress in 1971.

While Stagnation kind of just stayed the same.

Ah well, what do I know. Even Simone de Beauvoir never became as popular as Simon.